Nvidia CEO: We're Bringing GPUs into the Cloud

"Computer graphics is at the cusp of being revolutionized again," thanks to the ability to do fluid and light simulations on graphics chips, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said at the opening of the company's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) today. Huang showed new applications of GPUs in gaming, announced two new new Tesla GPU boards aimed at high-performance computing, and demonstrated GPU cores in the cloud.

"Computer graphics is at the cusp of being revolutionized again," thanks to the ability to do fluid and light simulations on graphics chips, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said at the opening of the company's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) today. Huang showed new applications of GPUs in gaming, announced two new Tesla GPU boards aimed at high-performance computing, and demonstrated GPU cores in the cloud.

Huang started by talking about computer graphics, and the company's recently announced 28nm Kepler architecture. He called the latest GeForce GTX 690 "the world's most advanced graphics board, based on two Kepler GPUs" (technically the GK104).

He showed a number of traditional gaming demos, but I was more interested in the demo of real-time ray tracing on the board.

This technology will expand over the next few years, and as a result, computer graphics will look nothing like the simple shading we see in console and PC games today.

"Kepler is a big deal for computer graphics, but an even bigger deal for high-performance computing," Huang said. It has major advances, including a streaming multiprocessor core called SM; and the new SMX architecture, which has 192 cores and is three times more energy efficient than the architecture used in the company's previous Fermi chip. Another feature is Hyper-Q, which allows 32 work queues, which lets multiple CPU cores send much more work to the graphics processor, and thus keep the graphics cores busy all the time. Finally, it has "dynamic parallelism," where the GPU cores themselves can create work within their threads, based on their own results.

These features will make Kepler particularly suited for high-performance computing. As an example, he introduced a demo of an n-body simulation. With Fermi, the company had shown a demo of 20,000 bodies interacting with each other, but with Kepler, it showed a demo of 280,000 bodies interacting, revealing a very fast simulation of the interactions between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. On Fermi, the demo could show one million particles per second, while on Kepler the demo could handle 10 million particles per second.

For this market, Huang announced two new boards. First up is the single-precision Tesla K10, out now and aimed at imaging, signal and seismic applications, with three times the performance and 1.8 times the memory bandwidth of the previous boards. This is slated to be followed in the fourth quarter by the double-precision Tesla K20—aimed at fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, and financial and physics applications—which adds the Hyper-Q and dynamic parallelism features.

"We're going to put the GPU into the cloud," Huang said. Kepler is the first GPU designed for cloud computing, he said. That's because it offers a virtualized GPU, low-latency remote display features in that it no longer needs to be physically connected to a display, and low power so it can run in distributed data centers. The virtualized GPU is the core of this, as until now GPUs had to be dedicated to a particular application.

One application for this is the "BYOD" movement where companies allow users to bring their own devices to work, but allow them access to virtual machines in a private cloud with streaming applications.

Citrix and other companies today allow for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with products such as Xen Desktop. But until now, such devices have used software-based GPUs because GPUs cannot be virtualized. Now, the company has introduced the virtual GPU hardware in Kepler, along with driver and software that works with Citrix's solutions, allowing power users and designers to have a remote GPU dedicated to their environment. Huang demoed this with Citrix Xen Desktop running Windows on an iPad with GPU acceleration.

In another demo, a computer graphics artist from Industrial Light and Magic used a MacBook Air to access a Windows machine on a server running Autodesk's Maya modeling software.

He then showed a wall of 100 different machines all accessing the GPUs from a single server.

A Cisco representative talked about a new version of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) that supports Nvidia's virtual GPUs technology. Huang added that the GeForce Grid, a method for streaming video games over the cloud, is more convenient.

He said the problem with streaming games over the Internet is input lag—the time between when you do something on your computer or console and when it takes place on the screen. The big advantage of GeForce Grid, he said, is that it is able to reduce the lag to about the same time as a normal console and TV. He brought up a demo of the upcoming game Hawken to show this. Huang said Nvidia wants to get the cost of the service to be comparable to Netflix, and said Nvidia will be working with Wal-Mart, other game services, and cable companies to bring the service to market.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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